


yesterday is gone

by werepope (quiteparadise)



Series: Less than 12 days of Xmas [4]
Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: F/M, Homecoming, Lucille worship, Sibling Incest, Sibling Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 08:11:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5489963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiteparadise/pseuds/werepope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Sharpes return to Allerdale Hall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	yesterday is gone

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes it feels like it is over and it's not.  
> Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it's over.
> 
> Juliana Spahr, "Turnt"

Lucille is not broken, but harder than the last time she stood on these floors, under the bristling arches of these corridors. She is brittle beneath the paper-fine cover of her skin, the lines and curves of her skull more visible, her skeleton winning the long war against flesh. Her hands are so cold in his.

The treatment of the others in the asylum had surely been worse than hers. No matter how the title had come to her, she was still Lady Sharpe. What comfort gentility gave her he cannot guess. Perhaps less at fourteen than at twenty, with their sharp-toothed house gaping open at her long-awaited arrival.

These rooms have been shut up for six years, tended only sparingly, but there is not sadness in Lucille's gaze as they make their first tour as master and mistress of Allerdale Hall. Her hands linger fondly over the scarred woodwork of the banister, the damp silk on the walls, the stained porcelain, the once fine canvases of long dead family dimmed and warped in their frames.

They pull the dust covers from the furniture. They light fires in the grates. They drag and scrape and stuff life back into this place, their place, and when night falls the house takes its first ragged breath since they departed it, sighing around them.

Thomas takes Lucille's hand and leads her into the bathroom where their mother died, to the tub where Lucille painted her first gruesome tableau. He turns on the taps, lets the water run, red at first and then clear. He helps her with the tiny buttons of her dress, the ties of her petticoat and crinoline, her corset, her bodice, her chemise. He strips her of her multitude until she is pale and wan and almost frighteningly bare.

She is no longer fourteen and he is no longer twelve.

He chafes his hands against her arms to rid her of gooseflesh that she doesn't have.

"Aren't you cold?" he asks, as she takes down her hair.

It shone when they were children, the softest thing he had ever put his hands on, and he had loved to brush it out until it was a sheet of silk around her shoulders. As an adult it hangs impossibly long, unfurling from the confines of a braid, and this is the first time that he sees the softness of his sister through the steel of years spent out of his gaze.

He gathers a hank of it, just to feel the weight against his fingers. He bends to press his nose into the soft strands, breathe in the scent of her, of colocynth and lily, to sweep the fine texture of it across the sensitive skin of his lips.

Lucille steps into him, and the smallness of her is a tender revelation.

"My Thomas," she says, carding her fingers into his own dark curls.

He kisses the fragile slope of her shoulder, the hidden thrum of her pulse, the sharpness of her cheekbone, the sad pink bow of her mouth.

"Always," he promises.

Lucille smiles and helps him with his ties and buttons.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Crimson Peak: The Art of Darkness_ says that Thomas and Lucille returned to Allerdale after Lucille's release at eighteen. My headcanon says they returned after Thomas turned eighteen. Headcanon wins.


End file.
